


Strain and Steel

by spitecentral



Series: Brothers and Bothersome Dragons [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Coming of Age, Dragon!Al, Found Family, Gen, Minor Characters: Rick and Rio, i think???, sometimes a family is a dragon; a city; and lots of cats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 12:37:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15267660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spitecentral/pseuds/spitecentral
Summary: Moving to a new city is hard; moving to a new city when you're a dragon is so, so much harder.





	Strain and Steel

**Author's Note:**

> *arrives two months late with starbucks* so in my defense I hadn't actually been planning on a sequel, but here we are.
> 
> If you're new to the party, you should probably read part one in the series first, because I really don't think this will make any sense whatsoever without it. However, if you're, say, a comic book reader and used to confusion because some writer fucked something up along the way and now someone's dead or retired without warning, you can go right ahead, I guess.
> 
> I also have some Notes(TM), but I'll just write them at the bottom since they're not important. Other than that, enjoy!

Rush Valley was weird, and very, very tiny. Ed insisted that it was actually a perfectly normal size for a human city, but Al was pretty sure he was lying. He couldn’t maneuver himself through the majority of the streets, and if he spread his wings out wide, he could cover entire blocks in shadows. He couldn’t remember much of the cave system he and his mom had lived in before being driven to the woods, but he remembered walls towering over him and tunnels wide enough to eat you whole, and he remembered that his clan was one of the smaller ones. That humans could consider such a minuscule settlement a ‘city’ baffled him.

Then again, he’d also been very tiny when he’d left his clan. That could have something to do with it.

Regardless, the longer he lived among humans, the stranger they became. Over the years, he’d gotten used to Ed’s quirks, and now he learned that a lot of them were considered normal for his species; humans were just like that. Humans were weird about nudity, raw food, and magic. Especially magic. He’d never seen another species so violently awful at magic. 

Though, they seemed to have their own type of magic. Almost everyone in the town had metal limbs like Ed, and you practically stumbled over the metalworkers that made them. Everywhere you went, it smelled like oil, grease, and fire, and the tinkering sounds echoed through the streets like incantations. No matter how many times he saw it, Al continued to be fascinated by the way humans could bend metal to their will without a single spell, and the way their machinery moved and supported people seemed to be a magic in and off itself.

That was where Winry came in, who was probably the most bizarre person he’d ever met.

In the forest, Ed and Al had spent hours trying to keep his metal limbs together, and days upon days worrying that they would fall apart. Winry had taken one look at Ed, hit him on the head with a wrench, and proceeded to build two entirely new limbs within three days.

“She’s a miracle worker,” Al whispered in awe, watching the sunlight glint off the newly polished metal.

“I’ve improved my technique over time, but they aren’t miracles,” Winry said to Ed, who wouldn’t stop wiggling his fingers. “They’re light and durable, but not ‘ten-years-in-a-forest’ durable, so don’t go disappearing on me again, idiot!”

At first, Al assumed that she was this strict and automail-obsessed because she’d just been reunited with her childhood friend after years of assuming him to be dead. But soon, he learned that she was just kind of like that.

Specifically, he learned that when he woke up to her studying his scales. 

“Stay still,” she said, not even looking up. “Ed says that you can understand me, so I’ll just keep talking to you even if I have no idea what you’re saying. Did you know that your tail has stronger scales than your neck?”

She waved a broken drill at him, leaning even closer to his tail to examine it with a magnifying glass. 

“The drill didn’t pierce neck scales either, but its tip only got flattened when I tried it on your tail, suggesting that it has some kind of armour that your neck doesn’t, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I mean, why does your tail need that kind of protection? If your neck gets pierced you’re dead; why not focus the armour there?”

In response, Al breathed fire high up into the air, resulting in screaming people down below. Winry, however, didn’t so much as flinch. She just looked thoughtfully at the stream of flames, rubbing her chin.

“Well, I suppose that explains that. And let me guess, the reason your tail is armoured like that is so that you can swipe any weapons away from people?”

Al nodded, making the house he was lying on creak dangerously.

“Interesting. Would you mind rolling over so that I can study your stomach? I’d like to get as much samples as possible before I start to theorize what your scales are actually made of. Right now, I’m leaning towards platinum or even diamond, but I can’t be sure, especially since the colour -”

“Al! Why the fuck did I see fire!” Ed interrupted, climbing through the attic window. “People won’t stop trying to come into our house, and they have pitchforks!”

Right on que, a pitchfork shut up in Al’s direction, accompanied by a cry of “Die, beast!”. Before it could even hit the roof, however, it fell down, loosing traction. The people waiting at the bottom scattered to avoid being hit themselves.

“Not a very impressive mob,” Paninya noted, crawling onto the roof after Ed.

“Not the point! Al, we talked about this!”

“He was helping me with my study,” Winry protested, waving the broken drill and magnifying glass at Ed.

Ed rubbed his forehead. “Study?” 

“I’m trying to figure out whether or not dragon scales could help make automail stronger,” she said, ignoring yet another pitchfork that was thrown at them. “See, it’s documented that almost nothing can pierce a dragon’s skin, and yet they can still fly, which seems contradictory if we account for both their mass and sheer weight their armour must have, so I was wondering if the scales could make automail both lighter and more durable -”

“I do not want my scales ripped out!” Al squeaked, at the same time Ed yelled “Don’t you dare rip Al’s scales out!”

“Of course I’m not going to rip out his scales, what am I, an animal?” Winry scoffed. Then she glanced at Al and added, “No offense.”

“Guys, the mob’s getting really rowdy,” Paninya interrupted, narrowly dodging a rock. They’d finally caught onto the fact that pitchforks didn’t make for good throwing weapons, and now, they were focusing their attention on large pebbles, and the occasional cloth ball set on fire. 

“This is ridiculous,” Ed muttered as he stomped out the flames. “You’d think they’d never seen a dragon before.”

“They probably haven’t,” Paninya reminded him. “We didn’t all grow up in a magical forest house.”

“Should I try to make friends with them?” Al asked, worryingly glancing down at the crowded street, not even feeling the rocks that were hitting his skin.

“I’m not sure you can,” Ed responded. “I say we turn them to stone.”

“That’s really harsh, Brother.”

“Rocks are also really harsh!”

“We’re not turning them to stone,” Winry interrupted. “Leave them to me.” She pushed her magnifying glass into Ed’s stomach, threw the broken drill on the ground, picked up her tool kit, and stomped forward to the edge of the roof, until she was in full view of the mob. She took a deep breath.

“IF I SEE ANY OF YOU THROWING ANOTHER ROCK, YOU’LL BE REFUSED SERVICE BY ROCKBELL AUTOMAIL!”

Almost immediately, the rocks, fire, and angry chants died down, to be replaced by murmured confusion. 

“Miss Winry?” a man with a mechanical arm said, holding onto a rock mid-swing.

“Yes, and if you’d all shut up and listen for once in your lives, you could stop wasting those rocks on us,” she said, crossing her arms. “This dragon is crucial to my research, so if you want better automail, I’d learn to live with him.”

“He shot fire!”

“Because he was telling me something. He’s been here for an entire week and he hasn’t destroyed the town yet, and you were all okay with it until now, so don’t start! Don’t you have a job to do?”

“He’s dangerous!”

The woman who had spoken got hit square in the face by a wrench and went down, landing hard on the cobblestone as Winry pulled out a screwdriver at lightning speed. 

“So am I. Anyone else want a headwound?”

The crowd scattered like ants, and before long, the streets around their house were cleared again.

Al didn’t know much about humans, but he did know that even by their standards, Winry was terrifying.

///

After that little incident, the town warmed up to Al surprisingly quickly. 

Part of it was that Winry explained her project good and proper. She suspected that dragon scales had some kind of magic either making them lighter, making them stronger, or both. She was trying to research what it was, exactly, and how it was woven into the material the scales were made off, in the hopes that she could replicate it in her automail. 

The other part was more political.

Rush Valley fell under the jurisdiction of a man named General Albrecht, the man who Paninya had tried to rob before they’d first met. He was petty, creepy, corrupt, and didn’t do a very good job keeping an eye on the town, as evidenced by the fact that he was entirely surprised when he came to ‘visit’ Rockbell Automail and found a dragon staring at him.

“Is there a problem, sir?” Paninya said, leaning against the doorpost with a giant smirk on her face.

The general, a tall but scrawny man with painfully blonde hair, looked at her in horror. 

“You’re dead,” he said stupidly, taking step back, closer to his guards, who seemed to be just as terrified as he was. 

Paninya studied her arms, her eyes comically wide in fake surprise, and it was all Al could do to stop himself from laughing. 

“I’m... dead?” she said, an exaggerated frown on her face. “But I’m looking way too good for a zombie.”

“There’s a dragon,” the general said, still trying to climb into his guards.

“Yup!”

“Why didn’t I hear about this?”

“I dunno. Maybe you were too busy hitting on girls twenty years younger than you?”

And at that, Al actually did laugh, the tremor reverberating through the house, rumbling through the streets. 

The general didn’t know how to get away fast enough, jumping into his car and driving off at top speed, yelling about getting Central involved, whatever that was.

There were no taxes collected that month, and the village knew exactly who to thank.

The next day, they started to sturdy the Rockbell’s block, enough that it could hold a dragon’s weight.

///

With the block steadied, Al had a little more freedom to move around. But still, it was tougher than it had been in the forest - this place just plain wasn’t made for him. He could never enter the house, and whenever he needed to eat, he had to fly out of town to catch something, because there was no way humans could cook for someone as large as him. He couldn’t even walk the streets without crushing cars and narrowly avoiding humans.

Ed, however, was thriving. 

It was clear that he had missed this, being among his own kind. He smiled more than he ever had before, bright laughter trailing up from the window, followed by playful bickering with Winry. When, at home, he’d spent his free time caring for the forest creatures or developing new incantations, here, he spent it reading, absorbed so deeply into his books that even Al couldn’t pull him away from them. These streets were built for him, and he navigated them with ease, befriending the neighbours and the shopkeepers, understanding the language and its nuances, and relearning some human things that he’d forgotten, all alone with only animals and a creature of magic for company. Sometimes, Al could barely recognize him, in clothes that weren’t made from leaves and magic, functioning machinery attached to his body, and body language that was less dragon by the day.

But still, he dragged his blanket up to the roof every night to poke at Al and tell him about his day, and he brought the books he’d been reading with him. He told Al about the stories within them, or the information they contained; if they were magic books, they laughed together about the incompetency of human wizards, pointing out all the places where they were misinformed or just plain wrong. And they still talked, deep into the night, about everything and anything, and sometimes even their feelings.

“I’m lonely,” Al said, once such night.

Ed didn’t answer, but silence spoke a thousand helpless words, or so Al thought.

Really, he should’ve known him better by now, because if there was anything Edward Elric did not stand for, it was helplessness. 

///

The next morning, Al woke up to a cat in his face. 

The tabby in question was orange and brown and black and very, very scared. It snarled and hissed at him, trying to back away, but held firmly in place by Ed’s hands. 

“It’s a cat!” he said, proudly holding the scratching thing up to Al’s nose.

“I can see that,” Al replied, trying not to feel hurt when the cat let out a terrified meow. “It doesn’t like me much.”

“Sure it does!” Ed said, ignoring the cat’s very obvious denial. “Her name’s Petunia, and her owners had to move and couldn’t take her with them, so now she’s yours.”

“Brother, I don’t think she’s going to stay near me for very long if we give her a choice.”

“Who says we’re gonna give her one?”

And that’s how Petunia ended up in a small cage beside Al, still extremely terrified and hissing for her life.

Al looked at her, careful not to swipe his tail in doubt, as he otherwise might have done. He wasn’t sure the buildings next to him could take it.

“I really don’t like this,” he said.

“Learn to!” Ed replied cheerfully, ducking through the attic window back inside. 

Petunia hissed. The sun was setting, and it was clear that Ed wasn’t going to change his mind before the night was out, at least, and Al couldn’t open such a small cage by himself.

So he just sighed, and settled in for the night, trying to ignore the hostile cat beside him.

///

By morning, Petunia was calmer, and she’d pressed her whiskers against the bars of the cage, looking at Al with big eyes, head a little tilted. Al knew she was trying to tell him something, but he didn’t know the language of cats yet, or at least not the house cat dialect, so he could only understand anything beyond the general sense of questioning curiosity coming from her. 

In return, he tried to radiate warmth and safety, while he settled in to observe. 

When Ed came back at the end of the morning, they’d managed to exchange a few simple words, like “Safe”, “Big”, and “Teeth”. 

“Could you let her out?” Al asked. “I don’t think she’s going to run.”

Ed grinned. 

///

Petunia did, in fact, run, but she returned with many more cats, in white, in black, in orange, in brown, and in every shade or match up of the above. 

Seven days after Ed had brought Petunia home, Al spoke House Cat fluently, and he slept covered in little kittens and street cats, who claimed that he was the warmest thing in town.

Petunia proudly sat up, paws majestically in front of her, very smug about it. 

///

One day, Petunia came back with two human children.

“You know you can’t steal those,” Al reminded her, nervously observing them. They did not seem scared of him, although one of them had his mouth open, a gap between his teeth clearly visible, and both of their red eyes were wide in awe.

“Of course I know that, I’ve been among humans longer than you have, stupid dragon,” Petunia answered, swiping her tail angrily. “But they’ve been trying to get to you for a week now, and it was beginning to get quite pathetic. Suki, head cat of their district, asked me personally to do something about it.”

“They’ve been trying to get up here?”

“Do you think it’s talking to the cat?” the littlest boy, the one with a gap in his teeth, whispered to the older one.

“Of course not, stupid,” the taller boy hissed back, but his eyes were flitting from Petunia to Al at lightning speed. 

“Could you get Ed to translate?” Al asked Petunia. She scoffed.

“You need to learn to be more independent,” she said. “Take this as an exercise.”

And before he could get in another word, she’d jumped off the roof, leaving him alone with two children who did not understand him in the slightest, and who barely even seemed aware of the fact that he was a sentient creature.

They were still gaping at him.

Al sighed, rumbling the building despite the reinforcements. The children squeaked and grabbed onto each other.

It was going to be a long day.

///

By the time Ed crawled up the roof with a blanket and a stack of books, Rick and Rio had taken to climbing all over Al’s scales.

Ed raised an eyebrow.

“Help?” Al tried weakly.

“Who’re they?” 

“Don’t be rude and talk about us as if we’re not there, mister!” Rick called out from upon his back.

“I shouldn’t be rude? You’re climbing on Al!”

Rio scoffed, hanging off Al’s shoulder spikes. “If the dragon wanted to stop us, he could’ve.”

“Al can understand you, and stop talking about him as if he’s not lying right there!”

“It’s okay, Brother, I let them.”

“What?”

“Well, duh, of course he can understand us,” Rick said, swinging his legs idly. “He asked us for our names.”

“ _What_?”

Al nodded to the words he’d scratched in the roof with his claws. “I can’t talk Human, but I can write it!”

Ed stared at the words, then at him, then at the children crawling on him, and jumped back through the attic window without a word.

“Your books are still here!” Al yelled after him.

“I’m not dealing with this today!” Ed yelled back.

“Kind of uptight, isn’t he?” Rio said.

Rick nodded. “You’d think someone who befriended a dragon would be a little more wild.”

///

It took all of three days before Al become the favourite jungle gym of the children of Rush Valley. Paninya thought it was hilarious, Winry found it adorable, and while Ed looked like he wanted to rip his hair out at first, he began to support the change once he accepted the fact that he’d never find peace on his own roof ever again.

“Never really managed to stop adopting strays, did you?” Ed laughed, watching a three-year-old attempt to climb his nose.

Al, careful to hold as still as possible, answered: “What, like you ever thought I did.”

///

The revelation that he could still write Human even if he couldn’t speak it didn’t actually help him much. There was rarely enough room to write on with his gigantic claws, and soon enough, his own roof was full. Some neighbours offered up theirs, but it wasn’t a permanent solution, and they all knew it.

The closest thing they had to a permanent solve was the clearing right outside the city, relatively accessible to most children, definitely accessible to most cats, the ground was loose and could easily be wiped clean if he needed a new slate to write on, and it was close enough to the forest that Al could manage to hunt without the fuss he needed to. The city offered it up to him, asking if he’d like to build a house there.

The truth was that yes, yes he did, but there was one big thing - or small, depending on how you measured it - that stopped him.

It was Ed; with the clearing being across the city, he probably couldn’t come see him often.

“It’s fine,” Ed insisted, but they both knew he was lying, and truth be told, Al wasn’t very keen on being separated from his brother either.

He knew, logically, that it had to happen sometime. Ed was an adult now, and Al, though not quite there according to dragon laws, certainly had enough experience to live on his own. They couldn’t keep being joined to the hip while they grew older and older; aside from being impractical, it just wasn’t healthy, and nobody wanted them to end up in a relationship even more codependent than the one they already had.

But still. If he moved to the clearing, there’d be no more nights with magic books, and he wasn’t confident he’d be able to travel through the city at all once he’d landed in the clearing - walking the streets or roofs was still a hassle at best and impossible at worst, and until there was some kind of solution to make that the slightest bit easier, so that he wouldn’t have to rely on Ed to come visit him, he’d rather not move that far away.

Winry accepted that challenge. 

///

She crawled onto the roof, head hidden beneath a large stack of books and paper, and shooed away the kids. The cats could stay, as long as they didn’t crawl over her paperwork.

“I’ll be asking you yes and no questions only,” Winry said. “If you have something important to tell me, spew fire, and I’ll get Ed to translate. Nod if that’s okay.”

Al nodded.

“Good. So the problem is that you basically have no way to get around the city easily, correct?”

Al nodded. 

“Currently, the beams on his house are barely holding you, even after fortification; theoretically, you’d need something that could hold at least 2000 kilograms easy, preferably something nearer to 3000 or 4000, in case you grow. Are those calculations correct?”

Al did a quick add-and-subtract in his head, and nodded.

“Does Ed really know how to grow magic vines?”

Al nodded.

“Could those vines hold 3000 to 4000 kilo?”

Al thought about it, then shook his head.

“Could they hold it with steel reinforcements on their undersides? Maybe even some diamond screws and bolts?”

Finally, Al had some idea where this was headed, and he nodded enthusiastically.

“Final question: if we built something like an airborne highway for you, using magic vines, steel, and diamond, would you use it, and would it help you?”

Al grinned almost as wide as Winry did, showing off his teeth.

///

The construction began next morning.

Al made the diamond bolts and screws needed, using his magic to turn regular steel into gems, Winry and the other metalworkers made the reinforcements, Ed grew the vines, and Paninya and a group of others went to work on screwing the whole construction together.

A month later, and the city had a spiderweb above it, with thin but strong vines covered in steel and diamond spreading out across it, creating the perfect pathway for a dragon.

Al hopped and flew across the city, cheering people beneath him, and thought that he could learn to live like this.

///

Two years after Al had moved into Rush Valley, and he was lounging on one of the paths above the city, observing the streets and listening to the bustle of people. Beside him, Ed was working on his balance for his newly fitted automail leg, one with magic woven into them like Al’s scales. It was an experimental model, but Ed hopped across the air seamlessly. 

“You might even be able to outrun Paninya with that,” he said, lazily swiping his tail.

Ed scowled. “Winry’s already outfitted her.”

“Tough luck, then.”

They settled next to each other, just staring as the sun went down. Nobody even looked up at the dragon and the boy lying above the city, except for a few stray children, who yelled at Al to pick them up. He blew tiny flaming butterflies for them instead, and they screeched in delight. 

“You happy here, Al?” Ed asked.

Petunia walked up to them, purring at Al and hissing at Ed, climbing up on his back and nestling herself between his shoulder spikes. 

“Yeah,” he breathed, watching the last of purple rays of sunshine disappear.

**Author's Note:**

> And now, the promised Notes(TM): 
> 
> \- Yes I know the ending sucked, it was disproportionally hard to end this thing so I just kinda had to go with whatever, don't judge me.
> 
> \- The good news is that I managed to write Winry, the bad news is that I have no idea whether I did good or not, but she totally seems like the type of person to involve magic in her science. 
> 
> \- Pinako isn't here because, tbh, I kind of forgot she existed? Whoops. Just pretend she's on some extended work trip to examine Xingese automail or something.
> 
> \- This is an 'everything is happy and nothing hurts' au in addition to being fantasy, to the Ishvalan Massacre never happened, and Rick and Rio are in Rush Valley because their mom could get some fancy eye surgery or something (I mean, it makes sense that an automail hotspot would have some really talented surgeons, right?)
> 
> \- As you'll notice this is a weird au of both 03 and mangahood; it was originally going to lean towards mangahood, but then I needed kid characters that could semi-realistically be in Rush Valley and I was too lazy to make OCs, so here we are. And yes, I did fuck with the timeline, there's dragons in this AU, does it look like I give a flying fuck?
> 
> \- By now you might have noticed how badly I planned this out. In my defense, I'm not getting paid for this, I just wanted to write found family fluff and dragon shenanigans but then I decided to up the ante by involving an entire city when I hadn't even planned out a sequel to the first part, let me live. This is also my defense for any inaccuracies there might be between this and Scales and Skin.
> 
> \- This is too heavy on the 'tell' part of 'show don't tell', but the other option is somehow writing and planning a novel-length fic with proper pacing and I mean?? I can't even plan two +- 4000 word fanfics????
> 
> \- If you can't tell I low key hate this, but on the other hand it has dragon shenanigans and found family fluff and CATS, so I think I did fine.
> 
> \- (I'm doing a lot of complaining but seriously, I love writing fantasy au's, I know I sound grumpy right now but I'm happy I swear, I just talk like that.)
> 
> \- Now for a Fun Fact: Team Mustang was supposed to show up, called on by Albrecht, but I couldn't find a good way to fit it in. Let it be known, though, that the Flame Alchemist/Wizard is absolutely nothing in the face of a firebreathing dragon. That is all.
> 
> \- ALSO you can assume that, in the two-year time period that Al has been here, Albrecht is no longer responsible for Rush Valley, which may be because Paninya and Al harrassed him into leaving, or because Ed pulled a Youswell and scammed him out of the deeds. I haven't decided yet, but let it be known that he's joined Yoki on the run from the military.
> 
> \- My favourite scene to write BY FAR was the mob scene, and I really think it shows. I love dragon shenanigans.
> 
> \- My final self-review: 0/10, needs more Paninya.


End file.
